Police widen kidney racket probe, send out teams

NEW DELHI: The special investigation team (SIT) formed to probe the kidney racket busted on Friday by the south-east Delhi Police is conducting raids in several states to trace the donors and recipients of illegal kidney transplant done allegedly at the Apollo Hospital, senior police officers said.

Investigators have already identified and verified three donors, and they are making efforts to trace the two other donors whose kidneys were illegally transplanted to patients at the hospital.

The two, police said are natives of Kanpur in Uttar Pradesh and they were lured to donate their kidneys by Satya Prakash alias Ashu, one of the members of the racket. Ashu, his two aides – Aseem Sikdar and Devashish Mauli – were arrested along with two men allegedly working for a doctor at Apollo Hospital. Police said the gang was involved in illegal trade and transplant of human organs.

The hospital in its statement on Friday denied any wrongdoing on its part and said that the arrested men were “secretarial staff of some doctors” and “not employees of the hospital”. The statement said that the hospital had been a victim of a well-orchestrated operation to cheat patients.

Mandeep Singh Randhawa, deputy commissioner of police (southeast), said that so far five cases of illegal kidney transplant have been verified and the ongoing probe could help them unveil a few more such cases. A senior investigating officer said that the teams will also be sent to Kolkata, Nagpur, Chennai, Hyderabad, and Jaipur to trace T Rajkumar Rao, the alleged kingpin of the racket, who was earlier involved in running two similar rackets in Coimbatore, Tamil Nadu, and Jalandhar in Punjab.

Police are also probing the role of another senior doctor of the hospital, member of the hospital’s internal authorisation committee, sources said. According to police sources, the doctor will soon be asked to join probe. Two other doctors, whose names have surfaced are abroad and would join the probe once they return, a police officer privy to the probe said.

“Prime facie, it looks that the doctors and members of the hospital’s internal authorisation committee were unaware of the entire nexus between the gang members and office staff,” said the officer.